Swans album Soundtracks for the Blind to get served up on first-ever hot slice of vinyl, CD reissue with expected condimentsSwans album Soundtracks for the Blind to get served up on first-ever hot slice of vinyl, CD reissue with expec

Swans has endured a few iterations over the course of its decades-long existence, with each seemingly exhibiting a darker shade of grey — and their most recent release The Glowing Man was emphasized by front-man Michael Gira as signaling a precursor to a third (major) iteration that will purportedly feature a “revolving cast of collaborators.” In other words, the relatively static lineup that was inaugurated in 2010 has been dissolved, and during such times of temporary artistic instability, the impulse toward oeuvre reflection seems hard to avoid. And today, it’s the the 1996 Swans album Soundtracks for the Blind that gets the attention of our backward-looking eyes.

Soundtracks was the last album before a new iteration as well; and as such, it features, in addition to Gira, the long lost (but not forgotten) Jarboe, Clint Steele, Norman Westberg, Algis Kizys, Bill Rieflin, Christoph Hahn, and Larry Lame, among others. The album is getting its first vinyl reissue on July 20 courtesy of Gira’s Young God Records, and it’ll come in the form of a box set containing four LPs, a poster, an insert, and a download card. This lavish box will be limited to 4000 copies, though; and once those are exhausted, a gatefold LP will come out to satisfy any stragglers.

Additionally, because some people still lurve CDs, the aforementioned box set is being accompanied by a CD reissue, which’ll come with the 1996 EP Die Tür Ist Zu (a German language version of some of the songs from Soundtracks that, coincidentally, was just released for the first time on vinyl in the US for Record Store Day 2018) as a bonus disc.

Swans tends to traffic in epics, and Soundtracks is — uh, duh — no exception. Pre-order the new iterations of the album here and reacquaint yourself with the nature of that particular bygone era of Swans epic-ness down below.